I thought, Therefore i was.

Nefesh B’Nefesh is an organization that promotes immigration of North American Jews to Israel, and helps them navigate the bureaucracy of becoming a citizen. Part of their efforts include reaching out to Anglos currently living in Israel (of which there are many), and encouraging them to switch from residing here as tourists on a visa, and become legal citizens of the country. The challenge is that many people living in Israel don’t see a big difference between living here on a visa (which they do for a variety of reasons) and becoming full-fledged citizens. As part of our brainstorming campaign, our marketing team developed the concept of “Making it Official” – that they key benefit of becoming a citizen is that it positively cements your identity as a bona-fide Israeli. The idea we came up with was to identify key moments that identify a person as no longer being a tourist, and being familiar enough with Israel’s culture and language, that indicate that a person is ready to go “all the way”. I brainstormed key social cues and phrases that are inherent to life in Israel, and these were turned into visuals for print and digital campaigns by the excellent team at verticalloop. We even decided to transliterate the phrase “Officially Israeli” - which was the to be stamped on all the creative - into Hebrew, as a hat tip to Anglos who had been here long enough to read the Hebrew, and who would appreciate that transliterating English into Hebrew is a common quirk in Israel society. I’ve included some examples of banner ads we created for the campaign, which serves both as an example of the importance of understand the cultural attributes of your target audience, as well as the creative benefits that this knowledge can provide you.